CAPE's Christmas Cards

CAPE is an Ealing-based charity that reaches out to local people living and working with mental health difficulties. They offer many day services, including creative art workshops. CAPE art workshop leader and freelance illustrator Sri McKinnon says, “Through the art workshops, which are run supported by Creative Futures (www.creativefuturesuk.com), we aim to help raise the self esteem and create confidence in those involved, inspire a sense of responsibility towards others through working towards shared goals and offer participants new ways to express themselves creatively.

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CAPE used the art workshops leading up to December to create a line of Greeting Cards for the festive season, which they’re selling to raise funds for the charity’s other endeavours - IT/computer skills, literacy and numeracy classes to cookery, crafts and well being/health groups.

Sri, who leads the workshops, explains “We created these Christmas-focused workshops to inspire a sense of pride and achievement with the results, as the cards are a way of giving participants something tangible to take away at the end of the project which reminds them of the positive impact of the art workshops.”

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“We used different techniques and methods to make each festive-inspired design.” Sri tells us. “Two designs were made by using collage techniques of cutting and sticking colourful paper shapes , and the other using a fun ink transfer technique. We also cut snowflakes out of white paper and rolled ink over to use the negative space. All in all, we were able to make a variety of Christmas inspired imagery and everyone enjoyed working together to meet the challenge! I then grouped the artworks together and photographed them so we could produce a set of 5 cards.

“The cards are mainly sold in our CAPE on-site charity shop by staff members but also by our clients to the wider community. One lady even managed to sell some at her local church! The first run of MOO printed Christmas cards were so popular we have had to order a re-print."